Related to the Mad Scientist, the Omnidisciplinary Scientist is a master of every branch of science, regardless of the branch in which they theoretically have a degree. A writer either didn't do the research or maybe They Just Didn't Care. If someone is a scientist, and something about science needs to be known, the scientist will know it or learn it by the end of the episode.

Films are particularly bad about this. It's understandable that a producer needs to reduce the number of named characters, so anything "scientific" is handled by the existing "science guy" character. However, it strains Willing Suspension of Disbelief when the guy who was just working on the nuclear reactor turns around and is suddenly a xenobiologist, chemist, alien technology expert and computer programmer as well.

Then again, maybe the character really is just that smart, running around with superheroes and aliens and unbelievable circumstances of all descriptions, it certainly wouldn't be the strangest thing going on in that fictional universe.

Compare to the Renaissance Man who is also very knowledgeable in multiple fields - but not necessarily all of them. Some of these fields may be arts such as painting, or literature. May possess Encyclopaedic Knowledge if their interest stray outside of science.

Note also that the 'plausibility' of this trope is context-dependent. If a story presupposes an immortal character, for example, that character might well have had time to master many disciplines of study (though perhaps not to be up on the latest developments in all areas). Likewise, a non-human mind might be capable of anything, or a future/alien technology might enable learning by means other than the hard way, or the character has Super Intelligence as a power. Or, like the Doctor, all of the above.

This is part of the Hollywood Science belief that big things are made by a single "scientist" (sometimes with a bunch of useless assistants). In reality, this usually isn't the case - most developments are incremental and made through the collaboration of many people who each have special knowledge of one small part of the problem. Of course, there are exceptions which make it a bit of Truth in Television. This is also common with people who take knowledge as a hobby, trying to get as much information as possible instead of specializing in a single discipline (and as gadgeteers usually also encompass being engineers at the same time).

See also Super Doc for the medical version of this. In works of fiction, a doctor is almost always a hybrid between a medical doctor and something else (in the case of omniscience, everything else). In real life, a doctor is a physician with a doctorate of medicine (M.D.), or a Ph.D in any field, regardless of being a practitioner of medicine or not.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Mazinger Z features a villainous example: Big Bad Mad Scientist Dr. Hell routinely designed and build Humongous Mecha, complex computing systems, giant flying ships, submarines, all kind of weapons and devices (including a size-changing ray in one episode), cyborgs... He would need being an expert on any field of science to achieve all those scientific breakthroughs and perform all those feats, including physics, engineering, maths, robotics, computing science, cybernetics and medicine. In contrast, Dr. Kabuto and Professor Yumi subverted the trope, being experts on one field and needing help or expert advice in other areas, and using the trial-and-error method to make breakthroughs.

Professor Kenzo Kabuto from the sequel Great Mazinger was also a subversion, right like his father Juzo Kabuto.

Dr. Black Jack may be an Omnispecies Omnidisciplinary Doctor: he can perform surgeries and autopsies and deliver babies. And transplant horse brains into humans. And stitch together a child using her parasite twin body parts and plastic. He had even performed surgery on a dog, a whale, a ghost, a computer, an alien, and himself.

Not only did he perform abdominal surgery on himself to remove a parasite, he did so in the middle of the Australian outback, all by himself, while simultaneously fighting off dingoes.

This is a pretty common trope in stories by Osamu Tezuka. In his original Metropolis manga, Duke Red not only creates an army of robots, but also a machine that makes artificial sunspots & other weirdness, although he does have to turn to a specialist to get a proper Artificial Human. Most of the numerous scientist characters in Astro Boy are omnidisciplinary to some degree. Ochanomizu, whose main background is in robotics, also comes up with inventions like a bomb that flash-freezes everything for miles around & even a device that can read minds (although considering he's the head of the Ministry of Science he may have had some help with these). Astro's creator Dr. Tenma is said to be an expert in both Artificial Intelligence & the Human brain, which handily explains why Astro has such a lifelike personality, as Dr. Tenma could draw on his knowledge of neurology to create a computer system that emulates the Human nervous system.

Dr. Shiba from Kotetsu Jeeg. Not only he was an accomplished archaelogist but also he could cure people, make cyborgs, build a Humongous Mecha and flying ships, and transferring his mind from his dying corpse to a computer.

For the original OVA, her having knowledge about everything in existence is helped by the fact that she personally had a hand in creating everything in existence...though she's intentionally restricted her memory of that since being omniscient is apparently boring.

Many of the "Meights" in The Five Star Stories, scientists who create either Humongous Mecha "Mortar Headds" or Artificial Human "Fatimas" & in rare cases both, are skilled in other fields as well. This is justified by the fact that they are, like the other super-people in FSS, descended from genetically engineered superhumans. While Headliners get Super Strength & Divers get Psychic Powers, Meights get super intelligence.

Watari from Yami No Matsuei is unbelievably proficient with hacking and decryption, involved in maintaining the computer-based reality where the series' summoned gods live, and good enough at chemistry for potion-based Mad Science, and he's alluded to having had done other things. His PhD? In Mechanical Engineering.

Professor Desty Nova in Battle Angel Alita mastered every practical and theoretical science up to and including nanotechnology before inventing "karmatron dynamics". Which he also makes great progress in.

Ritsuko Akagi from Neon Genesis Evangelion. She supervises Nerv HQ's science department and seems to be an expert in everything Project E requires (biology, metaphysical biology, engineering, ordnance...), along with computing, physics, and medical science. Ritsuko is the show's go-to for "voice of expositional scientific and technical authority".

Dr. Vegapunk of One Piece is described as studying both cells and battleship and came up with many of the technological advances used by the Marine. The guy is a One-Man Industrial Revolution. If it's a field that involves science, he's studied it, and except for ship building, pioneered it. He wrote the book on Devil Fruits, figured out what they are, how they work on humans and how to feed them to inanimate objects, studied the sea's energies to create various purposes and coating from seastone, created at least two dragons, and is the leading expert on cybernetics. Pretty good for an unseen character who just set out to bring summer to his home island.

Fan Works

Father Leo/Ultraman Lugeno from Ultraman Moedari is not only a Badass Preacher who memorized the Suma and the Bible, but also knows all sorts of sciences, even of the alien or timeinology sort. Lampshaded several times. Somewhat justified as he is a very old and learned ultraman.

Comic Books

Hank "Ant-Man" Pym started out as an entomologist. His training studying insects also left him able to, among other things, create shrinking particles and artificially intelligent robots. Although perhaps his complete lack of relevant background in the latter field helps explain that particular example of A.I. Is a Crapshoot.

One issue of Secret Invasion contained a hilarious but possibly inadvertent sight gag with a board listing the eight or so completely unconnected disciplines that Pym was giving lectures on his cutting edge research in.

Further evidence of Hank Pym being this trope in pop up in Mighty Avengers, wherein he is conferred the title of Scientist Supreme of the Earth-616 universe. Though it turned out that was just Loki screwing with him.

That was actually a lie on Loki's part.

In the Ultimate Marvel universe, on the other hand, Hank Pym is a specialist in cybernetics (which apparently includes both robots and insect control), who claims to have created the Giant Man formula, when actually he "merely" reverse-engineered it based on his wife Janet's mutant DNA. In an argument between the two, Janet hangs a lampshade on this by saying that he's already a great cyberneticist and doesn't need to make people think he's an amazing geneticist as well. Later, after discussing his interrogation of several Spider-Man villains for their scientific secrets, Janet remarks "Oh, so you're a psychologist now?"

This was also lampshaded in the mini-series Fantastic Four: True Story, where Reed said at one point; "This will require me to create an entirely new field of scientific study. Give me a couple of days."

Middle-lampshaded when Reed told Hank Pym he's the best biochemist in the world, so he would need weeks to be as good as him. Pym comments it's no wonder that people hate Reed.

In Marvel 1602 he invented several disciplines of science. Okay, so he picked out different names, but the dude came up with our modern foundation of science by himself.

In Marvel Apes it's established that Reed has a fellowship for achievement in multiple fields of study named after him.

One issue of Ultimate Fantastic Four states that Reed Richards' status as an Omnidisciplinary Scientist is at least partly due to the nature of his powers. Just as his body has become infinitely flexible and stretchable, his brain has as well, allowing him to adapt his mind to tackle any number of subjects. The mainstream comics also strongly imply this is the case.

Former Fantastic Four writer John Byrne has jokingly stated that Reed has one degree, "in Science".

During the Civil War crossover, Reed claimed that he had invented a working theory of psycho-history in college, being inspired by reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels. The conclusions he came up with through his psycho-history studies convinced him to throw in with Tony Stark and the Pro-registration side. This may have been an Author's Saving Throw to justify his siding with Stark, as his initial justification, that his uncle was wrong to go up against Joe McCarthy, was not well received by the fans.

In one issue, Reed claimed to know more about Pym particles than Hank Pym. Pym's response? "It's on, bitch."

Naturally, Doctor Doom will not be outdone by the accursed Richards. Many Fantastic Four villains fit this trope, in fact, but Doom is the only one who can claim to rival Reed- he usually claims to be better, with some justification. Doom specialises in robotics and he invented an interdimensional doorway as well as time travel, but you'd be hard pressed to find a field he hasn't mastered. Unlike Reed, he is also a very proficient sorcerer.

His Doctorate is, however honorary and self awarded. Not that he's not intelligent and learned enough to possess several, but receiving one from an educational institution would require him to bow to the judgement of inferiors.

Reading the early Spider-man comics, it looks like Peter Parker is also an Omnidisciplinary Scientist. Able to build an electromagnetic device to stop the Vulture one week, and mixing up a chemical concoction to cure the Lizard the next. It seems that Stan Lee gave all of his "scientists" this trait to a certain degree. Later writers seem to try to narrow it down to a single field or two.

Interestingly enough, Spider-Man usually goes the other way. Writers can often forget that Peter Parker is (or was) a fledgling super scientist and just cast him as a photographer with above-average intelligence and a secret identity. Considering how many OTHER super-scientists there are in Marvel canon, it's not surprising that they let Parker go his own way. It doesn't come up much, but his actual degree is in Biophysics, which- given his powers- crosses over into Boxing Lessons for Superman.

That said, Hank Pym looked at his spider tracers in Marvel Knights: Spider-Man #15 and was shocked that Parker was able to develop something at 15 so akin to Pym's own kit for communicating with ants (which took years to develop), and in the New Avengers Tony Stark made a point of using Spider-Man's science brain rather than his spider powers. This may be considered to have backfired on Stark given that Peter discovered and put his own override on Tony's backdoor into the Iron Spider armor. Older issues though say that his spider-powers give him an intuitive grasp of how to make his spider-tracers (which are attuned to his Spider Sense), so not (wholly) an intelligence feat.

One issue of Exiles sent them to an Earth that was conquered by Skrulls in the 19th century. When the Skrulls left, the top scientists who studied their technology were Reed Richards, Bruce Banner, and Peter Parker. Reed Richards was the top scientist, but he was only just coming to grips with radio.

Oddly enough, Iron Man (Tony Stark) mostly gained this after Stan Lee's writing stint. He was originally and is primarily an electronic and munitions engineer, an ambitious enough combo on its own. However, later writers have seen him brought in to consult on everything from spatial anomalies to medicine.

His mutant talent is along the lines of Mad Science. He can create tremendously complicated machinery that can do anything. He sometimes has to take it apart to figure out how it works. And he therefore doesn't always realize when there will be side effects.

The trope is played with in one Incredible Hulk mini-series; Bruce Banner is found after one of the Hulk's rampages through a town, and all but refusing to let them help him, offers his own help, saying he's a doctor. "Medicine?" He admits he's a physicist, but that he's also a willing pair of hands.

Played straight in general with Bruce Banner - he started out as a physicist working on a gamma bomb, but is apparently a skilled enough biologist and engineer to attempt to cure himself of the Hulk several times throughout the comic's history with new antidotes and/or new devices. Some adaptations play the above example straight, implying that he also has an MD.

In Gold Digger, both Gina Digger and her rival Penny Pincer qualify, as they are both able to construct power armor, teleporters, cloaking devices, making and using advanced medical equipment, chemistry, particle physics, AI programming, some forays into time travel, and are joint founders of a new field, 'Beta technology', based on manipulation of 'phantom mass' as well as allowing tapping into the ether stream where magic gets its punch! This multi-talentedness also applies to Erwin 'Peewee' Talon, Dr. Alfred Peachbody and other scientists in universe, but we get to see it in Gina and Penny the most.

Handwaved in the instance of Gina. She apparently spent all her time getting degrees, at least until a certain 'incident' that caused her to go boy-crazy. Penny Pincer is also an old-fashioned heart surgeon (Gina actually rattles OFF a few of her degrees in an early comic).

There's also Mr. Terrific, whose non-metahuman "power" is to be an expert in any field he applies himself to which has led to him holding various completely unconnected doctorates (and still fight crime on the side). It's not just scientific fields. At one point he jumps into a jet fighter and starts flying. When questioned about how he did it without, say, crashing, he claims he's a fast learner.

Batman is occasionally portrayed as an Omnidisciplinary Scientist as well, impressively building the JLA Watchtower using Martian, Thanagarian, human and New Genosian tech. It also shows in his detective work, although he does have a computer that appears to be incredibly advanced and considering the members of his Rogues Gallery it's vitally important that he be familiar with chemicals.

A side issue in the Tower Of Babel storyline made this explanation explicit. Batman's anti-JLA weapons were specifically adapted from his foes' technologies. Scarecrow's fear gases to give Arthur hydrophobia, Mad Hatter's mind technology to make Wonder Woman think she was locked in battle with an equal opponent and so on.

In the New 52, Superman supporting character Dr. Veritas is stated to be an "omniologist."

The older sister from the Valiant series The Troublemakers is also another example coming by this trope with superpowers. She's just more skilled then anyone nearby. Her parents are smart enough to toss her in a lab with some brains to get work done...but not smart enough to keep her away from a crazed near-god.

Peric in The Trigan Empire is the Omnidisciplinary Scientist par excellence. Initially an architect, he later builds a space rocket, invents a machine for turning men into intelligent water (!), discovers an elixir of youth, etc. etc.

X-Men tried to subvert this and ended up using it perfectly straight with Bolivar Trask, the anthropologist who first considered mutants a menace. Trask built the robotic Sentinels to protect mankind and they immediately turned against him claiming to be his superiors. Professor X commented that this had happened because Trask was an anthropologist and not a robotic expert, and therefore had an inadequate knowledge of cybernetic brains. Building self-aware robots seems an accomplishment in cybernetics. Then again, doing so seems particularly easy in the Marvel Universe.

X-Men also has Xavier himself - not the degree of Hank Pym, but he is at least an expert in genetics and the creator of Cerebro. He's not a half bad medic either. He also managed to build a jet he could remotely control via telepathy, but no one talks about that anymore.

Hank "the Beast" McCoy had his brains undergo an inflation similar to Superman's powers going from Flying Brick in the Golden Age to almighty in the Silver Age. In the early days he was just the best and most studious of the school's students. By now he's a world-renowned expert in every science there is, and when it comes to solving the science-based problem of the week, be it a virus, a killer robot that doesn't respond to Eye Beams, etc. he'll be the one to do it. Officially Reed Richards is the smartest human in the Marvel Universe, but Beast really can stand up to him in the actual count of scientific day-saving moments. Need a device to make the godlike Dark Phoenix's butt temporarily kickable? He'll whip it up in an hour. The Big Bad is using an alien spaceship left behind by The Precursors? He'll pull up a chair and make it work for him in under an hour! Legacy Virus? Get on it, Hank. And somehow, even with the superhero-ing and research work in all fields of science, Hank also finds time to be a regular on the talk show circuit.

Interestingly, he's less like this in his Avengers appearances: when you've got a team with Pym, Stark, and Banner you don't need another genius, so he's more of a Boisterous Bruiser with his (considerable) physical powers emphasized (which have also greatly increased since his days as one of the original X-Men; he once casually boasted about being able to bench press 70 tons and his agility has always been on par with Spider-Man). However, that was when he was first with the Avengers, during the interregnum between the original X-Men series and the "all new, all different" one that introduced Storm, Wolverine, etc. This many decades of being the X-Men's resident genius later, it's no longer possible to ignore the brains angle. He keeps his X-Men characterization during Secret Avengers, and in that series he's clearly on par with Pym.

The independent comic 3 has as one of the main characters "one of the last generalists, a dabbler in dozens of fields."

Doctor Strange is the most powerful sorcerer in the Marvel universe and was one of the best neurosurgeons in the world prior to a car accident that left him with too much nerve damage to operate again. This presumably had no adverse effect on his actual knowledge of the field. In Doctor Strange: The Oath he mentions that he's maintained his medical license — something which requires yearly certification and a certain number of hands-on hours.

Jommeke has Professor Gobelijn, whose official title is 'Professor in EVERYTHING.' Too bad he is also the resident Absent-Minded Professor, so his inventions often cause problems.

Tintin. Professor Calculus is apparently versed in engineering (he built a working submarine), astrophysics (the moon rocket), nuclear physics (the nuclear propulsion engine), acoustics (a sonic weapon) and pharmaceutical and oil chemistry (identified the substance that ensured Every Car Is a Pinto and created a pill that makes you hate the taste of alcohol).

Professor Barabas from Suske en Wiske can build futuristic machines (including a time machine, a machine for talking to inanimate objects and a machine that can bring persons from paintings and other images to life), and has extensive knowledge about various historical and scientific subjects (including astrophysics and genetic engineering).

Nero: Adhemar, a five year old boy genius has built numerous space rockets, a huge computer, wonder pills and even invented medicines for diseases that haven't been discovered yet!

Doctor Cockroach from Monsters vs. Aliens is an expert in all things mechanical, and knows enough about biology to turn himself into a stable roach-man. Also, his Ph.D is in DANCE!

Yellow Submarine. Jeremy Hillary Boob (AKA the Nowhere Man) claims to be a physicist, botanist, and dentist. He also easily fixes the title ships engine, making him an engineer as well.

In Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman, this is played with in Batwoman as she appears to be a brilliant martial artist who also invented miraculous gadgets and is a skilled and experienced computer hacker. It turns out it is three different women using one costume who each bring their own skills to the table.

In Spider-Man, it is stated that Peter is taking an "Advanced Science" class. It is never described exactly what science they mean.

In Spider-Man 2, Dr. Otto Octavius is, presumably, a nuclear physicist (he was working on thermonuclear fusion in the film), but also apparently has enough knowledge of robotics and neurology that he can, on a whim, assemble four robotic tentacles and hook them up to his own nervous system. Despite this being an incredible accomplishment in its own right (just imagine the sheer possible application of the tech), Octavius only saw it as a useful tool for his fusion experiments (giving him extra "hands" to operate the equipment instead of having to rely on less intelligent people who he wouldn't trust to not screw things up).

In Spider-Man 3, there's bit of Lampshade Hanging: Dr. Connors tells Peter that he is a physics professor and not a biologist, but still will try to study the symbiote. He then provides all the necessary exposition about it (in the comics, Mr. Fantastic took this role).

There's a fun little independent Indiana Jones knockoff called The Librarian: Quest for the Spear, with Kelly Hu as The Dragon, whose protagonist is a thirty-two year old not-a-virgin who lives with his mother and has a combined total of something like twenty-two degrees. Somewhat justified in that part of the reason he's such a total social outcast is that he's forty-something and has spent more than half his life doing nothing but studying for those degrees. In the sequel, he meets a hot female archaeologist who beats him in the number of degrees.

In fact, the plot of the first film is kicked off when he's booted out of the university, where he'd gladly spend the rest of his days studying, so that he'd get some Real Life experience. He's immediately recruited into the Library. Through all three films, he continuously displays encyclopedia knowledge about almost any subject, often quoting some textbook or encyclopedia entry verbatim. This gets lampshaded in the third film, when a Mook notes that he speaks in paragraphs.

Any scientist from a 1950s atomic horror movie. The Deadly Mantis in particular hangs a lampshade on this by suggesting that all paleontologists (like its protagonist) must be omnidisciplinary, because the field requires so much speculation from trace evidence.

Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown from the Back to the Future trilogy built a time machine in his garage in 1985 and another steam-powered time machine by 1895. In the third movie, he explicitly says that he's "a student of all sciences". Granted, 20th century education would appear as such to a 19th century perspective. It was his job as a SCIENTIST! Like a lot of "scientists" and "professors" in film and TV, Doc Brown is at least as much an engineer and technician as he is a scientist. Which makes him an omnidisciplinarian squared, or something. But he calls himself a scientist, so who are we to argue?

Deliberately averted in Tremors; the seismologist grad-student is exasperated by people who think she can explain the sudden appearance of giant killer worms because she's a scientist.

In Top Gun, the Kelly McGillis character who serves as a civilian instructor to the pilots is described as an "astrophysicist". Guess those hot-shot Navy fighter pilots have a really pressing need to learn all about stellar evolution.

Doctor Morbius from Forbidden Planet is a philologist, but by the time the movie takes place, has constructed a sophisticated home to live in and built an impossibly complex robot, as well as able to analyze and use alien technology. He HAD been enhanced by an alien machine making him into a genius.

In Avatar, Grace Augustine is the foremost expert on Pandoran botany, but she also appears to be an anthropologist. And a xenolinguist. And a schoolteacher. Possibly justified: in canon, the CEO is presented as dismissive toward science, monofocused on the avatar project and consequent acquisition of mining rights, and antagonistic toward Augustine herself; she and her small team may be doing All The Science because she doesn't have the funding, or the staff, to do otherwise.

In R.O.T.O.R., Coldyron's nephew is studying at the 'science department' of Oxford University.

Iron Man franchise: Tony Stark, weapons designer, was able to build Powered Armor and clean, cheap, small energy, in a cave, with a box of scraps, in the first film. In the second, he made a new element in the space of a few hours, once he had the basic idea. Presumably if he had a whole afternoon he could fill all the blanks on the periodic table and create a perpetual motion machine.

Maria Hill: And when did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?

Tony Stark: Last night.

Ivan Vanko was able to do the same, in Siberia, minus the new element. He also hacks computers in seconds (Hammer, US government, and SHIELD tech), and is a nuclear physicist. If we believe Vanko, Hammer's software is "shit".

Also the captive doctor Yinsen, who manages to build an electromagnet and implant it into Tony's chest. The concept is somewhat simple, but to make a precise and effective one for the exact purpose in the movie, would require something of an expert in electrical engineering. And as any doctor will tell you, there isn't really enough time in your life to get a medical degree as well as expert knowledge in other nearly completely unrelated fields. He admits to seeing the kind of wound Tony has several times in his home village and as a result has had practice in treating it, somehow.

Justin Hammer claims to be this, but most of his tech doesn't work.

Hammer: For the record, the pilot survived.

To his credit, his mundane tech (namely, modern weaponry) does work as advertised. The man simply has no talent for innovation and his attempts at more advanced weaponry tend to be unreliable at best, as demonstrated by his "Ex-Wife" mini-missile.

Lampshaded in Thor, where Dr. Donald Blake, Jane's ex-boyfriend, was a medical doctor. When Selvig tries to get Thor out of SHIELD's clutches by passing him off as Blake, Coulson (correctly) points out that "Dr. Donald Blake" is an MD, not a physicist, to with Selvig hastily adds that he "switched majors".

Bruce Banner is a cellular biologist who, while hiding in Brazil, pays bills by fixing machines in a factory and builds himself his own lab in his apartment with spare parts. In The Avengers he is treating sick people in Calcutta. He is also stated to be the world's top expert in gamma radiation, and Tony Stark compliments him on his research in anti-electron collisions. If he's not an engineer/medical doctor/physicist, he's at least good enough to pass as all of them.

Lucius Fox in The Dark Knight Saga. He's the engineer who devises the technology that Batman's gadgets are based on, he also knows enough about toxicology to synthesize an antidote to Scarecrow's fear toxin, and he is also adept at running a Fortune 500 company. Granted, that last one's not a science, but it's definitely a refined skill.

Averted in The Man from Earth. John is intelligent, but not abnormally so. He claims to have collected ten advanced degrees over his extended lifetime, but he freely points out that no one can maintain current knowledge in that many fields at once. His 19th century biology degree is pretty useless now.

Averted in The Nutty Professor 2, where Sherman goes to meet his fiancée's parents for the first time. She mentions that they're "rocket scientists". However, they make it clear they have absolutely no understanding of genetics, asking Sherman to explain what he's working on in "layman's terms".

Dr. Noomi Rapace from Prometheus was originally an archaeologist focused on the theory of Ancient Astronauts. In the film she leads a survey mission on an alien planet and then later fronts a autopsy on a severed alien head.

Hank, per First Class, is not only an accomplished engineer but a skilled biologist. He's improved on the latter, as his serum now works as intended (more or less).

Trask seems to be a pioneer robotist, building robots that work in the 1970s, but he is also a skilled biologist, who can study mutants to the point of understanding how their powers work at the cellular level.

Professor Eggstrom ("The Egg"), the team's science wizard from Megaforce, is said to have "more degrees than a thermometer."

Literature

Subverted in the 1632 series. Any 20th century American with a high school education looks like one of these to a 17th century downtimer. But the real value is in technical knowledge and hands-on expertise.

In John Ringo and Travis S. Taylor's Into the Looking Glass series, there is William "Bill" Weaver, a scientist with multiple degrees and doctorates, which is part of why he became the chief astrogator for a submarine-turned-spaceship in the second book. Weaver is modeled on the real life Taylor (who wasn't involved in the first book).

Otto of the H.I.V.E. Series is trying to be one of these. Gifted with the ability to pretty much absorb books in minutes, he reads everything he can get his hands on, and has a working knowledge of most every subject. However, this is shown repeatedly to be nearly useless in practice, as reading about karate doesn't make you strong, etc.

While he specializes in computer and electrical engineering, Professor Pike also has a working knowledge of biochemistry and structural engineering.

In John RingoPaladin of Shadows series, Dr. Tolegen Arensky is a microbiologist with familiar with chemical weapons, and enough knowledge of nuclear weapons to preserve the effectiveness of a device. He also acts as the Kildar's medical doctor.

Doc Savage: He was a physician, surgeon, scientist, adventurer, inventor, explorer, researcher, and a musician. Though his team is made up of experts in their fields, only occasionally is Doc himself not better than they are. He's a better chemist than Monk, a better mechanical engineer than Renny, a better electrical engineer than Long Tom, and a better geologist than Johnny. Ham is the only one he doesn't outdo on a regular basis, leaving anything requiring the practice of law in his hands.

Judge Holden of Blood Meridian seems to have a pretty good education in paleontology, biology, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. He keeps all his notes on these various subjects in his ledger. Sociology and anthropology do rather go hand in hand. As with paleontology and biology. So he could have double-majored in anthropology and biology and minored in philosophy. In the Old West.

Leonard Da Quirm in Discworld has been kicked out of most of the scientific guilds in Ankh-Morpork for correcting the exam questions. He mostly follows the painting and engineering style of his counterpart Leonardo da Vinci, but has also invented guns, a submarine, a moon rocket, or the espresso maker, dabbles in cryptography for Lord Vetinari and sketched out plans for a nuclear weapon.

The natural philosophers in Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, most of whom existed and fulfilled this trope in Real Life (especially Robert Hooke, who was involved in a mind-bogglingly large number of disciplines). The implausibility of this being possible once science has sufficiently matured is brought up: late in his life, Daniel laments that with so many new fields emerging, it is becoming impossible for any new natural philosopher to be an Omnidisciplinary Scientist.

Ryeland Ames, from Jack Williamson's short story "The Dead Spot", is famous for having built a particle accelerator AND a bathysphere AND an artificial heart AND portable H-bombs; the first two of which before he was 25. Notice that the story was written in 1938.

Sax Russell in the Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars Trilogy develops in this direction. He's assigned to the original colonization mission as a physicist, but over time (a lot of time, as the longevity treatments developed in the first book greatly extend his career) he picks up Ph.D.-level training in chemistry and biology in order to further his goal of terraforming Mars.

That would be the guy who signs his letters "Abraham Van Helsing, M.D., Ph.D., D.Litt., etc." Three doctorates in different fields, plus implied other qualifications. Who knows - maybe he has a law degree too!

He does. He drops a casual mention of it in one scene.

John Lowson in Guy N. Smith's The Slime Beast. He begins the story searching for King John's treasure and is referred to as an archaeologist, but relentlessly pursues and tries to capture and study the title monster, suggesting a biologist or zoologist.

Deliberately with Weston in Out of the Silent Planet. In the "Reply to Professor Haldane", Lewis himself notes the weak point that although "Weston, for the sake of the plot, has to be a physicist, his interests seem to be exclusively biological."

Averted in the "Sherlock Holmes" stories: Holmes purposefully forgets anything that wouldn't help him in his work, even that the Earth goes around the sun. In the first story, Watson makes a list of Holmes' areas of knowledge, and they're extremely narrow. In later stories, this is somewhat retconned, with Holmes displaying a broader range of knowledge than Watson had indicated earlier.

Or he was simply taking the mickey out of Watson. In "... the Bruce-Partington Plans" he says "A planet might as well leave its orbit."

Arthur Denison of Dinotopia appears to be mainly a naturalist, but he shows aptitude in other fields, at one point even inventing a mechanical dragonfly-plane.

Isaac from Perdido Street Station is a justified example, as his omnidisciplinary approach to experimentation and research is why he's pointed out to Yagharek as someone who might be capable of tackling Yag's problem.

Dr. W.E.B. Du Havel of Honor Harrington is primarily a political scientist, but is stated to hold a great many Ph.Ds in multiple other subjects, almost none of them honorary degrees.

Partially averted and partially played straight with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, in which the titular Yankee does primarily stick to his stated areas of expertise (metallurgy and machining/mechanics) he does occasionally display some not-entirely-believable depth of expertise in absurdly unrelated areas, such as cattle husbandry, medicine, and microeconomics.

This is probably in part due to Twain himself possessing an astoundingly broad and sporadic technical education rather than a more focused formal one, as well as his lack of familiarity with metallurgy and chemistry, which he seemed to assume were more general disciplines than were, in fact, the case.

In A Song of Ice and Fire Maesters study to earn links of different metals, each metal representing a different discipline they've mastered sufficiently. To be a real maester you need enough links to form a chain you hang around your neck. Justified by the lower technology setting, and they still won't have links of every metal. Maester Luwin has a link of Valyrian steel that represents that he's studied magic, and notes than one in a hundred maesters have such a link. (Mostly because they're also taught magic isn't real, so what's the point.}

Live Action TV

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Warren's main area of expertise is technology and robotics, but he's got quite a few other fields down. He knows demonology and magic, and when he resurfaces in Season 8, displays enough knowledge about biology and brain surgery to lobotomize a restrained Willow.

In the Second Doctor story, "The Moonbase," the Doctor mentions that he studied human medicine under Joseph Lister, which means his knowledge of human medicine might be just a little bit out of date. (In addition, he gives the wrong time and place to have studied under Lister, suggesting he's misremembering or bluffing).

In "The Shakespeare Code" he manages to restart one of his hearts through a rather strange jury-rigged procedure, so he could have picked it up for real at some point, or he's simply better with Time Lord biology than human.

When asked in Colony In Space if he's "some kind of scientist", the Third Doctor replies that "I'm every kind of scientist."

In "The Empty Child", he performs (with his sonic screwdriver) an autopsy (effectively), listing all the possible reasons for the sci-fi zombie's "deaths".

Then there was Hot Scientist Dr. Liz Shaw, described as having degrees in at least a dozen fields. She didn't last long, though, since she was too smart to be The Watson all the damned time.

"Nonsense; what you need, as Ms Shaw herself so often remarked, is someone to pass you your test tubes and tell you how brilliant you are. Miss Grant will fulfill that function admirably."

Davros, creator of the Daleks, tends towards this as well. Described by the Doctor as having the finest scientific mind in existence, he uses his mastery of genetic engineering and cybernetics to make his creatures, then subsequently shows enough aptitude for medicine to work for a while as "The Great Healer" and enough knowledge of physics to design a bomb which can cancel out the electrical field holding atoms together and cause "THE DESTRUCTION! OF REALITY! ITSELF!"

Averted wonderfully in "Remembrance of the Daleks" when Allison is examining a soldier. When asked, "Is he all right?" she replies, "No idea, I'm a physicist."

This is rather elegantly demonstrated in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie during the scene showing the Vulcan "learning pits." The schoolchildren are answering rapid-fire questions from many, many disparate disciplines, showing how Vulcan education is intensely omnidisciplinary from very early on. This scene is actually a Call Back to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Spock, getting back in mental shape after his recent inconvenience, stands encircled by multiple computers all of which are engaged in separate tests which he has to complete or solve at the same time in various different ways - some require verbal answers, others typed answers, others touch-screen answers and so on. He multitasks effortlessly until one of the computers asks the question "How do you feel?" and Spock is utterly stumped.

In Dr Bashir's case, it was almost averted originally. When Deep Space Nine first started, Dr Bashir was the medical expert who didn't even know everything about medicine (for example, he once had great difficult with a dying Cardassian patient due to his (at the time) lack of knowledge of Cardassian physiology). As a result, Bashir was used to play up the "I'm a doctor, not a..."tradition instead. Very late into the show, it was revealed Bashir was in fact a Designer Baby and he was turned into a ridiculously Omnidisciplinary Scientist prone to Ludicrous Precision and capable of Improbable Aiming Skills almost overnight with the handwave that he'd been like this all along, but had simply been keeping it secret.

Jadzia Dax was also an example. Her exact specialisation was almost impossible to tell because her scientific knowledge accommodated whatever the plot needed her to know. She received the Dax symbiote at the age of 26 and confirmed in the first series that she had obtained all her many degrees and vast scientific knowledge prior to receiving Dax. She was also Dax's first scientist, the closest thing to a scientist Dax had previously hosted had been an engineer. As a result, even Dax's 300 years worth of experience couldn't explain why Jadzia had such a vast knowledge of science by the age of 28 (the Jadzia host's age as of her first appearance). Though it's somewhat justified as the the small number of symbiotes means that the Symbiosis Commission goes out of its way to pick only geniuses as hosts. The Dax symbiote's life experiences were later used to waive the rest of Ezri Dax's training to become a fully qualified psychologist on the grounds that her training couldn't teach her anything her 300+ year old symbiote hadn't already experienced. This was despite Ezri being the first psychologist to have ever hosted Dax and the fact that, as an Trill unprepared for Joining, the Joining seriously messed her up for a while.

Miles O'Brien was a non-com Chief Engineer with broad experience as both a soldier and technician, officially specializing in transporter operations (not theory). As a child, he tested at the very low end for scientific and engineering aptitude, only discovering his skill as an engineer during a combat situation where his life and the life of his squad depended on getting a broken transporter to work in a matter of minutes. That said, whenever Dax isn't around to fill the role of this trope, O'Brien steps in seamlessly; like when he figures out now only how a bit of accidental time travel sent three people (including Dax) into the past, but also how to recreate the effect reliably and precisely in order to send a rescue team to check out the various time-periods they might have ended up in.

Doctor Phlox on Enterprise had over a dozen different scientific degrees (but none in warp theory).

A minor (never-seen) character, Dr. Vassbinder, is apparently an expert in temporal mechanics, warp propulsion inter-relays, warp particle ionization, physiognomy, and psychology (the last three mentioned in the same sentence, even). Physiognomy is the study of using a person's face to determine their personality. Mixed with warp theory and temporal mechanics is outright bizarre, and still unlikely mixed with psychology.

Starfleet captains, but especially Picard and Janeway, tend to be this. They have science officers and engineers to do those jobs on a daily basis, but they know the disciplines well enough to keep up and contribute ideas when a specialist is explaining the latest Techno Babble to them. In a pinch, they can take over any job on the ship. It's never specified on-screen what their specialties were before they were captains, so maybe they were science officers or engineers themselves. But there's also things like Picard being one of the most accomplished archeologists and paleontologists in the Federation (for example, his discoveries include the origin of human life) despite them being only an off-duty hobbies of his.

Janeway served as a Science Officer before switching to Command, Seven of Nine was primarily an Astrometrics expert but her prodigious intellect and Borg knowledge left her highly skilled in many other areas, Harry was an Operations Officer fresh from the Academy who had, or soon gained Engineering knowledge great enough to rival the *actual* Chief Engineer B'Elanna, who seemed to specialise in every element of Engineering. The Doctor was the sum of all Federation medical knowledge, Chakotay was an accomplished archaeologist and anthropologist. Paris was not only a master pilot, but a starship designer as well. Plus he played medic on the side when the Doctor was not around. Tuvok was a Vulcan. Finally, Icheb retained the Borg capacity for information and knowledge, and quickly became a prodigy in Astrometrics, Cybernetics, Genetics, Geology and Engineering. Voyager may have been (unofficially, of course) a warship, but almost the entire command structure was made up of nothing but badass super-scientists that could put Reed Richards to shame.

The Science Officer of each ship actually oversees a number of departments, each of which is devoted to a different scientific specialisation. Therefore, each Science Officer needs to be well versed in every field represented aboard the ship and many more besides. It seems that Starfleet churns out omnidisciplinary scientists by the dozens.

On LOST, Dr Jack Shephard is a spinal surgeon, but seems to be up to speed on thoracic surgery, optometry, general medicine, and is relatively confident about delivering babies.

On the other hand, Juliet was useless beyond her specialty (fertility) and some basic first aid. Bernard the dentist applies medicine in a Closest Thing We Got fashion. Juliet, with Bernard's help, successfully removed Jack's appendix on the island. That doesn't sound like "basic first aid". Jack was coaching her, but Bernard knocked him out before he could give any real instructions.

On Crossing Jordan Nigel Townsend is a straight example of this. He knows everything about everything and readily admits it. It is even addressed by another character in one of the episodes. 'Dare I ask how he knows these things?' Another character responds, 'It's better not to question it.'

The Stargate Verse tried to avert this by bringing in guest stars or occasionally even nameless specialists. Also, while each member of the main SG-1 team could be The Smart Guy on any other show, each had his or her own specialty (O'Neill the military man, Carter the physicist, Teal'c who knows alien technology because he lived with it all his life, and Daniel the archaeologist, who knows what's going on on other worlds because he knows the cultures that influenced them or were influenced by them..) However, this trope is still played straight several times in the franchise.

In Stargate Atlantis, half of the main cast during the final season consists of scientists and medical experts with various specializations, and most of the other recurring guest characters are scientists as well. This would make sense, as it's a scientific expedition they've undertaken. That said, among the main characters Dr. Rodney McKay is the go-to guy for an inordinately wide variety of problems, as he has far exceeded his original field and is now Atlantis' omnidisciplinary expert on alien technology. Not surprisingly, as at the beginning of the series McKay was the only scientist in his team, while the other three main characters (Sheppard, Teyla, Ronon) were pilots and combat experts.

At the same time, McKay is utterly useless in biology and medicine, calling the latter "voodoo science". This doesn't stop him from being good friends with Carson Beckett and joining the Mile High Club with Jennifer Keller, both MDs.

On Stargate SG-1, Dr. Samantha Carter filled this niche prior to Dr. McKay. Originally a theoretical physicist, in the SG-1 team she was a standard Omnidisciplinary Scientist for everything technological, anything that didn't fit Dr. Daniel Jackson's specialties (archaeology and linguistics). (After the end of the SG-1 series, Carter was transferred to Atlantis, to take over command from Dr. Elizabeth Weir.) One of the few female examples.

Was humorously averted in Stargate SG-1 at times, though. One episode opens with the team encountering a woman in labor; all the guys look at Sam, who immediately yells, "What? I don't know what to do!" Daniel also had a Not That Kind of Doctor moment to the effect of "You're a doctor." "I'm an archaeologist." "But... you're a doctor." "Of archaeology!" when someone needed patching up.

At one point, O'Neill asks her about a worryingly close active volcano, but she replies that she isn't a volcanologist and can't help.

Jackson himself feels like a liberal arts version of this trope, given how easily he can provide information on any pre-modern Earth culture, plus his knowledge of languages. Contrast this with the movie version, where he was explicitly an Egyptologist. Albeit, an Egyptologist with enough knowledge of astronomy to be able to piece together how the Stargate worked. In this sense, the television show took away this aspect of Jackson's character. While Sam was allowed to encroach onto Daniel's territory with knowledge of anthropology and cultures and sociological knowledge, after the pilot episode, Daniel's ability to grasp things like astronomy was steadily removed and dumbed down to create the Overly Long Gag that the rest of the team were incapable of keeping up with Sam's super-intelligent scientific knowledge (this despite the pilot confirming Daniel had solved in two weeks, using astronomy, what she - the expert - had spent two years failing to discover). The short of it was, the plot dictated whether it was Daniel or Sam who had the answer, regardless of whether it made any sense for them to actually know.

An alternate interpretation is that Daniel understands a fair amount about astronomy, physics, and the like, but he recognizes early on that Sam understands it a whole lot better and generally defers it all to her. That is, he can make educated guesses about how scientific stuff works, but he (reasonably so) doesn't trust himself to really understand the inner workings of the matter. He would rather concentrate on diplomatics, language, and cultural studies. The gag about people not paying attention to Sam's Techno Babble has less to do with them not understanding it, and more to do with them not caring enough to listen closely.

In Stargate Universe Dr. Rush is set up to be this. Admittedly most issues brought up so far deal with ancient technology, which he is supposed to be an expert on, and the basics of other fields, he has a tendency to refuse all other help. Averted in the pilot however, when he needed an MIT dropout to solve a math problem that he'd being working on for 2 years.

In a later episode, he also admitted to Colonel Young that only Eli could have solved the problem of the week. Naturally, Rush immediately asks Young to keep that on the down-low, especially from Eli.

Eli himself is presented as becoming this when he and the crew (except Rush) got copied/timeslipped into the past, and wrote all the original science textbooks for the civilization the crew founded. Everyone seems to agree on two main points about Eli: He is, by far, the most intelligent and potentially valuable person on the crew, and if he is to ever achieve anything of lasting importance it is vital that he not know this.

Based on his function aboard ship and what he was originally recruited to the Stargate Program to do, it actually seems more likely that Rush is an engineer than a scientist. Which would explain why Eli was needed to solve the proof: it requires a more abstract sort of maths which is not only outside his field of experience, but works differently and it utterly counterintuitive.

Professor Arturo in Sliders, despite supposedly being a cosmologist or sometimes a more general theoretical physicist, successfully creates penicillin in an early episode (in a world where medicine was much less advanced). Later, quite unbelievably, he was capable of performing a Caesarean section on another (male) character, despite having no experience with any form of surgery, let alone such an exotic circumstance as a male pregnancy. And then there was the time he revived a deactivated android... However, each of these cases was lampshaded with dialogue about how hard and/or different from maths he found it.

Henry Deacon manages to be Omnidisciplinarian whenever the plot requires despite living in a town populated by scientific geniuses and which should, in theory, be able to field a team of specialists on whatever virus/natural disaster/temporal anomaly is threatening the town this week. He's also the town's mechanic. Lampshaded whenever he changes the patch he wears on his uniform to reflect whatever job he happens to be doing, as when he pulled a patch reading "Coroner" out of his pocket just as he walked into a morgue. The sheriff's dependence on Henry may be partially justified: given how eccentric most of the people he's met in Eureka appear to be, he might prefer to work with a guy who seems relatively "normal", and isn't going to wander off to play fetch with his robot dog or whatever.

He also had a patch ready after winning the town Mayor position.

Fargo seems to wind up as the assistant to anyone at Global Dynamics who's doing anything interesting, dangerous, or plot-important. It helps him live up to his Butt Monkey status, though you have to wonder how someone who looks like he's just out of high school could possibly have had the time to learn that much. He also takes over from Henry on several occasions. Later in an AU timeline (but still the same Fargo) he's smart and composed enough to run Global Dynamics and keep track of everything.

Interestingly subverted in one episode in which a disease that makes people stupid runs through Eureka. When Carter rounds up the scientists who weren't infected on account of being vegetarians who didn't eat the broken Artificial Meat and ask them to fix it, he quickly finds out that not every scientist is an expert in human immunology, winding up with a "chemist, a botanist, a math theorist, and a...lepipotamusnote lepidopterist".

The hero of Quantum Leap, Sam Beckett, had seven doctorates, including Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Medicine, Archaeology, Ancient Languages...and Music. He knows an awful lot but the time-travel process has scrambled his mind a bit, which means that he'll know or not know as the plot demands.

Dr. Jacob Hood, biophysicist and special science advisor to the FBI, from Eleventh Hour. Being an Omnidisciplinarian with an extra helping of awesomesauce is the entire role of his character.

Fred in Angel is presented as a physics student, but by the fifth season she's doing autopsies, examining things under microscopes, and boiling up chemicals. This despite the fact that she never even finished her first physics degree. Like other examples here, she does at least have a team that she works with.

Reid on Criminal Minds has Ph.D.s in chemistry, mathematics and engineering, BAs in psychology and sociology, and he is working on a bachelor's degree in philosophy.

Walter Bishop of Fringe is a partial subversion. His expertise ranges from biology to teleportation technology but at least has the good grace to not build things that work perfectly on his first try. (the teleporter for example does something very nasty, but non-lethal, to you). His son is close enough to this that he can point out when Walter is ignoring the laws of physics and common sense.

Fringe has actually been fairly consistent about it - Walter is mostly a trained biochemist, but he is also superintelligent and has spent a lot of time working with other disciplines. His more elaborate inventions were pretty explicitly developed in collaboration with other people. And he has a great deal of trouble with stuff outside his knowledge — when given a stack of books that explain a time machine, he complains that it would take 20 years and a team of expert assistants for him to absorb all the information. But he's smart enough to get the gist of how it works, even if he couldn't build one.

The show behaves as if "fringe science" were a single category of scientific endeavor, overlapping physics, biology, biochemistry, and a dozen or so others (Sonoma State University may have once offered a degree in fringe science, but Harvard not so much). Walter Bishop is shown as an expert on teleporters one minute and performing autopsies the next. They even occasionally send patients to his clearly unhygienic lab to have him perform surgeries. Not that the character isn't a hoot. He also knows a lot about LSD.

In reality more than a few fringe scientists do think like that. At least one of the cold fusion groups has a medical doctor as a consultant.

In reality "fringe" science is stuff considered so laughable that almost nobody studies it (you can pick up everything currently known about, say, Phrenology from one thick book) so there's very little to actually learn, almost none of which is actually useful. It's not hard to be a fringe science Renaissance Man - what's hard is being a practical fringe scientist. This makes some promising research projects(such as cold fusion) almost impossible to staff because the nutcase-to-Worm Guy ratio is just absurd - few mainstream scientists realize what they're looking at if anomalous data appears, and most nutcases think they've cured cancer if they drop bleach on the petri dish. Case in point, radioastronomers spent decades enhancing and tweaking their instruments trying to eliminate what they thought was earth-based "noise" before they realized they had discovered cosmic microwave background radiation.

She seems to be any type of biological science, Will is brought in specifically to deal with the mental doctoring and Henry is the technical expert.

Recently Nikola Tesla has being brought in for additional technological and immunological expertise (being a vampire might stimulate one's interest in biology, after all).

Gaius Baltar in the 2000s Battlestar Galactica is possibly a deconstruction. He's a computer scientist who's too arrogant to admit that biochemistry (or whatever other science he's consulted on) is out of his area of expertise.

It's even Lampshaded in one episode. After Baltar is left for dead on New Caprica, the job of plotting a course to Earth (previously one of Baltar's many responsibilities) is turned over to Lt. Gaeta, who, as Galactica's tactical officer, has an actual background in astronomy. Admiral Adama and President Roslin comment on the sudden improvement in efficiency.

And yet the voices in his head guide him to make a fully functional Cylon detector; too bad he's too scared to use it. It identified Boomer as a Cylon - but it takes 8 hours for a single sample to be processed. He would need more than 60 years to process all the samples of the refugee fleet. If he forgoes sleep that is. However, whether the reading was a false positive or whether Boomer, having already demonstrated Machine Empathy, was subconsciously manipulating the results is left unexplored.

Leonard and Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory are physicists, but seem well-versed enough in biology, genetics, robotics, and computer science to conduct experiments involving them as well. This is not including the various areas of science that they can discuss casually and in great depth.

Somewhat justified as the one who tries most to be an Omnidisciplinary Scientist is Sheldon, who is (the Hollywood version of) somebody who "suffers" from Asperger's syndrome. Also, he frequently turns out to be wrong when faced with topics unrelated to physics, such as when he tries to learn Chinese, or in the discussion with the comic book store guy, or even when it comes to semiotics (a tie on a doorknob?). As far as the battle robot is concerned, the driving force behind the idea is Howard, who is an engineer, not a physicist. In one episode he tries to help his biologist girlfriend Amy in her lab and fails utterly, despite being so full of himself he thinks he can do it.

Most of the show's main characters are geeks. While not absolving them of stereotyping, their nerdy pursuits would allow them to have working knowledge of any geeky interest they enjoy, as they would want to know how something from comic books or science fiction would be plausible; indeed, many cold opens are the guys debating the workings of superpowers, Time Travel, or science in general.

Howard's being an engineer, not a physicist, is brought up fairly often by other characters disparaging him because he "only" has an M. Eng.

Howard: I have a master's degree! Gablehauser: Who doesn't?

In fact, only Sheldon is a theoretical physicist. Leonard is an experimental physicist and Raj an astrophysicist.

Subverted when Howard claimed that as the engineer he is, he will fix the elevator in no time. Then claims the elevator is beyond repair.

Dr. Spaceman (pronounced "Spatchemmen") in 30 Rock performs work of all kinds; he's equally unskilled at all branches of science...

Partially averted in Power Rangers Dino Thunder. Although Tommy is well established as being a doctor of paleontology, this expertise in dinosaurs still enables him to create dinosaur cyborgs ranging in size from motorcycle sized to kaiju size, to create magical bio-armor (powered by magical "dino gems"), etc. He can do anything if its either shaped like or named after a dinosaur. More broad than the average paleontologist, certainly, but he's technically staying within his field of study.

Kinda justified by the fact that he spent hishigh schoolyears using hyperadvanced alien technology to fight crime as an afterschool activity. He was bound to pick something up.

He also had help, as it's outright stated that he couldn't have done it without Hayley. (Who is a straight example of this trope.)

Played realistically on NCIS when coroner Ducky is shown studying for his forensic psychology exam, which he passed. And...that's it. He hasn't gotten any more degrees, but that Master's FP degree comes in handy on several occasions.

Bernard Quatermass develops into one of these over the course of three serials. In his first story he describes himself as just an engineer and relies on surgeon Dr. Briscoe for anything relating to biology, but by his third encounter with aliens he's done quite a bit of brushing up on other fields.

Scorpius of Farscape fame specializes in many different fields: originally a researcher in wormhole physics, he's also skilled enough in engineering, cybernetics and neuroscience to invent the Aurora chair and a neurochip containing a replica of his personality. And he's also Wicked Cultured.

For that matter, Crichton himself. He holds no doctorates, calls himself a "God damned scientist" and gives his rank as "Commander" when he first encounters Aeryn (indicating he was the commander of the shuttle mission in which he disappeared through a wormhole). He's also a crack pilot proven to at least be on par with Aeryn in space and possibly a superior pilot in atmosphere, an engineer who designed and built the FarScape module (with his friend D.K.'s help) himself, is an accomplished enough technician to assist Gilina with repairing and installing a Peacekeeper defense screen salvaged from Zelbinion aboard Moya, heavily modified his module with Leviathan and Peacekeeper technology, even before having wormhole knowledge implanted in his head by the Ancients was well on his way towards single-handedly cracking wormhole travel (which entire races have attempted and failed), and built a nuclear bomb, among other feats.

Chase on House apparently spent about 60 years as a resident. While his place on a diagnostic team does indicate he would have a wide knowledge base he has performed actual surgeries in virtually every conceivable surgical discipline.

Averted somewhat by House himself- though he's a medical genius, he surrounds himself with a team of specialists to round out his knowledge pool. He apparently has a double specialty in Infectious Diseases and Nephrology (study of the kidneys).

Everyone on House's staff is one, considering they run every test themselves, instead of asking technicians to perform whichever tests are needed. Not only have they done every type of surgery, in between they operate an MRI scanner and do all kinds of microbial cultures. Sheesh.

It sorta makes sense. They do not have routine patients after all, and very often they only crack the case by spotting something wholly unrelated during a test, something that would have been completely overlooked or ignored by a 'mere' technician. For instance, when out of other ideas, they'll sometimes resort to a whole-body MRI in the hopes of finding something out of place. If they were to assign that to a tech, what exactly would they tell them to look for? But also, considering House's personality, he wants them running each test themselves to establish that he's the boss and can make them do the work of lowly techs, and so that if there's ever a mistake made in the test, he can hold them personally responsible for screwing up.

The X-Files: Dr Dana Scully sometimes comments on psychological issues despite the fact that it's Mulder who has the degree in this area.

Natalie on Forever Knight, although she's the medical examiner, is represented as doing a variety of science stuff (although not much is shown onscreen) in attempting to understand vampire Nick Knight's condition and "cure" him.

Charlie Epps from NUMB3RS is a mathematics prodigy. Besides being an Omnidisciplinary Mathematician (he seems to know everything about every algorithm ever made) he also seems to be an expert on chemistry, sociology, computer programing and physics. The only reason that he needs such a wide variety of skills is that the team of FBI agents he works with are all idiots.

Charlie has the sort of knowledge in the computer and physical sciences that are required support for a mathematics degree at many universities. Really, Amita is the expert programmer and Larry the expert physicist (and Bill Nye the expert chemist).

Dr. Julia Hoffman of Dark Shadows qualifies. When first mentioned (but not yet seen), she's an expert on blood disorders, then turns up at Windcliff Sanitarium where she demonstrates psychiatric/psychological training, and in later episodes turns out to be a qualified surgeon, research scientist (her search for a cure for Barnabas), and electrical engineer.

Topher Brink of Dollhouse is an expert in neuroscience, computers, and electrical engineering. It's somewhat necessary for his job. He's also been to medical school, though we don't actually know if he's an MD.

Echo is a more justified example - she has dozens of different personalities in her head, including a nurse and a few rocket scientists.

Averted on Threshold: fully half of the original red team are scientists, and a fourth is added later. All have different areas of expertise - the fourth is a plant biologist.

Standard procedure for most soap opera doctors. One on One Life to Live appeared to simultaneously be an internist, surgeon, OB/GYN, neonatologist, and pathologist.

Melrose Place: Kimberly started out as a surgeon. Then after committing a myriad of offenses which should have sent her to jail for life, as well as cost her her medical license, she effortlessly resumed her medical career...in psychiatry.

Averted in Caprica. Dr. Amanda Graystone works at the hospital as a plastic surgeon. Therefore, when she sees a car accident, she does not rush over to offer first aid.

Simon Campos on Flashforward is a quantum physicist who also reads medical charts and breaks encryption.

Siroc on Young Blades is introduced as a Gadgeteer Genius and man ahead of his time, but by the end of the series is shown as knowledgeable in knowledgeable in biology, engineering, forensics, medicine, and whatever other branch of science the plot requires.

Dr. Morris in Now and Again is a brilliant medical doctor, able to create an artificial human from scratch with superhuman strength and nanotech-based Healing Factor. He also performed the first successful human brain transplant from a victim of a subway accident to the new body. While being a clear case of Open Heart Dentistry, that's not all. First of all, there's the "nanotech" part, which requires one to be a computer engineer as well. One episode also has him demonstrate a prototype anti-missile shield and explain why it's current applications are limited (it requires a highly-ionized atmosphere, such as during a thunderstorm). This also, apparently, makes him an expert on particle physics.

Smallville: Emil Hamilton's official role (and actual job) on the show is as the team's doctor. However, he's also everything from Gadgeteer Genius to biologist to coroner when the team needs him to be. If the team needs computer skills, they'll go to Chloe or Tess. If they need anything else, they go to Emil.

Intelligence has Dr. Shenandoah Cassidy, the designer of the computer chip in Gabriel's head. Neurosurgeon, computer scientist, electronics engineer, pathologist, and that's only the first six episodes.

Averted in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Fitz, Simmons, and Skye are an engineer, a biologist, and a hacker, respectively, and each tends to solve the problems most suited to their domain. Simmons skirts this trope as she often acts as The Medic, but multiple episodes show her reaching the edge of her knowledge and seeking help from actual doctors.

Radio

The show "Ask Dr. Science" was about a man with a Master's Degree... in Science. His ideas were crazy. You actually can get a degree called "Master of Science" in some countries, but it must be in a subfield like Physics or Biology. You can't get a Master's of Science in Science.

Tabletop Games

GURPS had an explicit skill for this, called, appropriately enough, Science!The exclamation point was key. Later editions of the game generalized this beyond science to other skills; someone who had the equivalent skill for guns would get to use most of the Guns and Gunplay Tropes, for instance.

In the 3rd Revised Edition all these exclamation-mark skills were meant only for highly cinematic play, to simulate mad geniuses and gadgeteers, not realistic scientists. The 4th Edition retains Science! but only as a cinematic skill in order to simulate this specific trope. The ridiculously expansive skill list allows for a more realistic scientists (broken down to the level of era and subspecialties).

Similarly, Spirit Of The Century has a single Science skill, making it easier to have Weird and Mad Scientists. It's possible for a character to be specialized in a particular field, but this simply provides a bonus when working in that field; you can work outside this area no problem.

A similar system exists in another FATE-based RPG, the RPG adaptation of Atomic Robo. The Science mode confers every kind of science at its base value, which is justified by the way skills are priced - any given scientific skill has only two applications, and since skills are worth (application -2) points, scientific fields are effectively free. Anyone with Science as their primary mode has a base +3 to everything from geology to quantum physics. Science-primary characters are, however, encouraged to specialise in something to a) differentiate them from every other science-focused character, and b) make it easier to beat the other characters in a Brainstorm, giving the opportunity to gloat.

Exalted. If you have Lore and Occult, you can do Science. Probably justified in the case of older Exalts, who are hundreds or even thousands of years old and have thus had a lot of time to study. Every Exalt is a jack-of-all-trades with regard to any of the 25 abilities.

Of the 25 abilities, Craft is more specialized and broken up into 5 mundane abilities plus several more esoteric ones. Within a Craft an Exalt can make anything it would apply to. Combine Lore and Occult with a Craft and you do Engineering.

The Mage: The Ascension gameline from the Old World of Darkness was rife with this, as skills on the character sheet came in broad categories such as "technology", "medicine", "science", "computers" and "academics", specialization optional. The reality-bending technomages on the side of the Nine Traditions could easily slip into this trope, especially the Sons of Ether who embodied the Mad Scientist and/or Mad Doctor trope to a T. Strangely, all the awakened super-scientists, engineers, spacepilots, pharmacologists, cybersurgeons and geneticists of the Technocracy were far more specialized and usually stuck to their field of expertise, despite the fact that the Technocracy was All About Science.

It may have had something to do with the fact that the Sons of Ether tended to be loners or at the very least disorganized and thus were encouraged to be at least decent in a little of everything, while the Technocracy is Also All About Organization and had dedicated branches for specific needs.

Technically, a storyteller is instructed to require a relevant specialty to build, repair, or analyze something (e.g. to fix a car engine you could justify with craft spec "cars", science spec "engine design", etc). This is why specialties are relatively cheap and bought separately from the skill ranks. This was rarely ENFORCED for mages because the paradigm system usually meant that they could usually declare whatever specialty they had relevant (e.g. take crafts/pastries and the paradigm "everything is secretly a cake". BAM, now your skill focus lets you fix the car, because you see the moist, sugary goodness beneath the lie of spark plugs and pistons.)

Genius The Transgression has the same broad categories as all New World of Darkness games, but Geniuses also have the explicit ability to apply their skills to related yet bizarrely inappropriate circumstances. If they learn to drive a car they can use those skills to guide a spaceship through re-entry.

Then again, another of the abilities of a Genius is to spend Mania to intuitively understand technology. Given that "technology" is a very broad category, there's a high chance of overlap between those two skills.

Any character with Science skill in the current edition of the World of Darkness is this by default, as there's only one "Science" skill, just as there's only one "Academics" skill. Even the specialities are extremely broad, such as "Physics" or "Chemistry."

d20 Modern does divide the sciences into multiple Knowledge skills. However, there are only four of them - behavioral sciences, earth and life sciences, physical sciences, and technology. Under this system, a geologist character will also be an expert on biology. Furthermore, it is easy for a Smart Hero to max out several of these skills and be a true Omnidisciplinary Scientist.

Rifts and other Palladium Books games have this trope in spades. In the case of the original Rifts book, there's the Rogue Scientist, who can grab any and all science skills in the book. The CAF Scientist in Phaseworld is similar, though he does get to pick one science at a slightly higher bonus as his specialization (as in, his specialization is in one entire scientific field). Heroes Unlimited has other examples, but as the point of that game is to make comic book style superheroes, it's likely done on purpose in that case.

Maid RPG. In the replay "Maids at the End of the World", the Master is Masami Onji, a scholarly genius who is greatly knowledgeable about every field imaginable.

Since in Rocket Age Science is a skill that covers everything from physics to biology every scientist is the setting is assumed to be this, though they can and do specialise.

A more in-depth analysis of General Stanley's claims show that they are pretty much all either ludicrously simple or outright fabrications.

One of the major motivations of Goethe's Faust is that he is such an omnidisciplinary expert. He's mastered all the sciences of his time and found such grand knowledge unsatisfying, so he takes up magic and demonology and makes his infamous pact with Mephistopheles to carry him beyond mere science.

As said below though, far enough back in history one man could know all the scientific knowledge there was at that point.

Video Games

The Player Character in Runescape will become this eventually. Granted, it's more like an omni-disciplinary artisan, but the multitude of skills they're allowed to be good at and all the history they absorb probably qualifies them as this.

Parodied in Portal 2 by GLaDOS, who casually mentions an engineer with "A medical degree, in fashion." As usual with GLaDOS, this is just to torment the (female) player character, by taunting her about her image.

GLaDOS is one of these herself though, since she seems to be knowledgable about all fields of science. Not surprising as she is an AI.

Guildenstern in the Onimusha games initially seems to be only a demon biologist or geneticist, but later installments have him dipping into chemistry, electronic warfare, physics, engineering, and so on.

Caulder/Stolos in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is described by Dr. Morris as having been "kicked out of the medical academy", but is knowledgeable about a great deal of things unrelated to medicine.

Lash from the two prior games is a lesser version — she mostly showcases her mechanical knowledge but is proficient in several other fields as well.

The Engineer from Team Fortress 2 claims to have eleven Ph.Ds, despite specializing in building automated weapons and support devices in-game. After all he can build teleporters. 11 degrees do help with that. He does by by pounding them with a wrench, but still. The same sentence mentions that they are all hard science PhDs. Given that engineering is a broad field, involving mathematics and physics, it is comprehensible how he accumulated them, though it is still impressive.

The scientists from Half-Life all carry magic healing syringes, and can treat all injuries.

In the Haloverse, Dr. Catherine E. Halsey, Chief Scientist of the Office of Naval Intelligence, was the key mind behind all aspects of the Spartan-II project, from the augmentations to the MJOLNIR armor, and was also a major authority on Artificial Intelligences, among other things overseeing the creation of the AIs who were to be uploaded to the Spartan's MJOLNIR armor (most notably Cortana, who was directly copied from a clone of Halsey's brain). She was also heavily involved in researching both Covenant and Forerunner technology.

Professor Oak/Elm,etc from Pokémon claim to be "Pokémon doctors" which seems to mean that they're geneticists, naturalists, and maybe veterinarians. But they have the technological know-how to build electronic encyclopedias, teleporters, artificial intelligences, and some crazier things.

Though each one does claim a specific field that they study. Professor Rowan studies Pokemon evolution, for example.

Averted by Mass Effect 1. If Liara is in your party when you encounter the Rachni, she will tell you she's an archaeologist, not a biologist, and has no idea what they are.

Being, at the time, thought as dead civilization and species, the Rachni would fall under archaeological study.

In the "From Ashes" DLC of Mass Effect 3, Liara's other companion on the mission on Eden Prime will ask if she ever uncovered a dinosaur while digging. She will point out that paleontology and archaeology are different fields before realizing the squadmate was joking.

Played straight in Mass Effect 2 with Mordin Solus — Although he is primarily a medic, he knows a bit about everything. He took the job as a back alley doctor on Omega Station as a peaceful retirement plan (which involved occasionally murdering criminals trying to squeeze him for protection money) after over a decade of work for his government's intelligence agency, both in field work and in designing biological and nanotechnological weapons. He also takes care of all the upgrades on Normandy SR-2 as his sidework, main project being studying the Collectors. Seriously, this guy really is the very model of a scientist salarian. But don't assume that he's a tech 'expert', or he will die in the final mission.

True to its Super Hero roots, City of Heroes has a few, the most notable being Mad Scientist Dr. Aeon. He's done time and dimensional travel, attempted a geothermal plant (which only failed because he hit a demon's prison while drilling and decided that would work way better than a volcano), created his own super-powered army, built a personal battle suit, and a virtual reality corporation. It's been said that he has the mental capacity to juggle hundreds of projects simultaneously.

Fallout 3 has Dr. Li and Dad (maybe others). Li apparently is trained in botany and hydroponics and also can make a mean Giant Stompy Robot-driving high-output compact fusion generator. Dad apparently has training with theoretical quantum physics (or whatever science is involved in the Genesis Device-like GECK) and also general practice medicine.

This trope applies for the player character him/herself, right from the first game. There is a skill simply labeled "Science", which among other things covers computer programming, pharmacology and agriculture. Medicine is a separate skill, though there is some overlap.

Doctor Dala in the Fallout: New Vegas DLC Old-World Blues claims to have 213 doctorates, many of which are in fields that didn't exist before she began studying them. She and the rest of the Think Tank have been "alive" for well over three hundred years by the time you meet them.

Every Capsuleer (that is, every player character) in EVE Online can be this. Cybernetics, "Neural Remapping" for super-intelligence, and effective immortality let Capsuleers master fields in astrophysics, mechanical and electrical engineering, "astrogeology", industrial operation, and economics, on top of being a weapons expert and having superhuman piloting skills. All this skill and knowledge has a tendency to make them feel a bit superior and distant, at best.

Mega Man X was found by Dr. Cain, who managed to build working knock-offs (even if reploids aren't as good as androids), which is actually kind of impressive for a paleobotanist (he was there looking for Mesozoic plants). A subversion since his failure to accurately replicate X is an ongoing part of the plot, producing Iris and Colonel as late as the fourth game.

Averted and lampshaded in Tales of the Abyss with JadeCurtiss. Everybody expects him to be one, but as it turns out his doctorate revolves around fonons rather than biology or medicine. As such, he gives one or two exasperated sighs whenever people have a science question and he has to explain that, it's "not (his) subject." Oddly enough, his inferior rival, Dist, is closer to this trope as he's done the same kind of research Jade has along with building huge machines.

Zigzagged a bit, though. Jade repeatedly claims not to be an expert in various fields, but if he's called upon to express an opinion anyway, or in one case comes up with an idea on his own that he wants confirmed by a genuine expert, he is always right. So while he claims not to be this, and makes a good point that you can't expect it, he's apparently well-read enough that he qualifies anyway. At one point in the game the party has to look through a library of science books, and Jade instead looks at a recipe book because he wrote all the science books in the library. He still expresses that he should only be expected to know one particular field.

Tales of Graces features Pascal, who seems to either know everything about anything even vaguely scientific (biology excepted) or can figure it out within a few seconds of observing the device in question. Of particular note is her method of fixing a Valkines Cryas: smashing it with a hammer.And it works.

One mission in Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2 involves helping a young genius doctor who moves to a small island town, only to be swamped with all manner of requests for help from the citizens. It seems that in addition to being a physician, he can also treat male pattern baldness, give therapeutic massages to animals, and repair microwave ovens. That's the whole joke, because he's doing non-doctor things.

In Metal Gear every scientist is this, especially Naomi, which is not only capable of creating a complex virus that targeted specific individuals, but also multipurpose nanomachines, both of which she injected Snake with at the beginning of Metal Gear Solid; In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots she also shows great understanding of computers, being capable of creating an encrypted file that only Sunny was able to decrypt.

In Arcanum, one of the professors at Tarant University studies both Phrenology and Demonology because he doesn't like the idea of becoming a specialist.

In Legend of Legaia, Dr. Usha is stated to be well versed in multiple scientific endeavors, both natural and alchemical, modern and ancient.

Dr Vahlen, the head of XCOM's Research Department in XCOM: Enemy Unknown excels in several different branches of science, including psychology and neurology (she personally oversees the interrogation of all aliens XCOM takes captive, which includes analysing their brainwaves), genetic engineering (splicing alien DNA into your soldiers in order to create Super Soldiers) and surgery (if you nominate a soldier for MEC Trooper upgrades, she carries out the prerequisite amputations). Her team is also responsible for alien autopsies and designing new weapons based on reverse-engineered alien tech, which suggests knowledge of xenobiology and ballistics, although that could be explained as the scientists reporting to her having skills in fields that she doesn't.

However, the game does avert it in one specific instance. After capturing an enemy Outsider, the cutscene in which XCOM evaluates the remains has Vahlen baffled as to what, exactly, the crystalline structure it left behind after being incapacitated might be. Chief Engineer Shen notes that this is because it's outside her field of expertise, because what she has there is a biological antenna.

For that matter, the generic scientists in the original XCOM games can handle tasks from alien vivisection to advanced weapon design to psionics to designing spacecraft.

Webcomics

In Girl Genius, several of the more powerful Sparks show this. Gil, for example, has built flying machines, extremely powerful electric generators, a combat-capable robot to practice fencing with, and built his own servant (plus repaired two others). There are a few more that are hinted to have this trope, but haven't exhibited their full range of talents (his father, Klaus, so far has mostly been shown working on biological sciences, though he seems to understand other fields quite well).

It is implied in the Girl Genius Wiki that most Sparks do stick to one or two fields - they're just 'Reed Richards on speed' in that field. Gil and Agatha's primary fields, for example, seem to be mechanical - while Word of God says that Klaus's specialities are biological stuff and reverse-engineering things built by other Sparks (and reverse-engineering other Sparks). So this could be seen as a type of Lampshading.

At least one character is a mad social scientist, who gets annoyed that the engineering ones steal all the funding. And to be more specific, Agatha seems to excel in making clanks and ray guns, although being a Heterodyne she has a LOT of natural talent in nearly any field.

Gil is actually more of a biology specialist, hence being the go-to guy for doctor questions, where as Tarvek is mechanical engineering, hence his facination with and amazing ability to create/manipulate the muses. All Sparks seem to come together on the subject of weapons.

Tarvek seems to be more like Klaus, with an extraordinary ability to analyze and replicate creations. His interest with the muses is just because they were built for his ancestor, and thus him.

Q: What kind of doctor is he anyway? That's a PhD on his wall. The sign in front of his office says he's a physician. In the one comic he's doing dental work on a patient, and then says he's a podiatrist!

A: Ninjas are mysterious in their ways. Way mysterious.

One scene shows the Doctor with a wall of diplomas.

It's finally revealed that Doctor McNinja is a master of all forms of science... because back in his college days, he had himself cloned dozens of times over, and sent the clone Mc Ninjas out. By the time they recombined, adding all of their accumulated experience and knowledge together, he had earned a legitimate doctorate in every single science... except agricultural science, because that particularly clone wasn't able to return.

This trope is later subverted again in the same comic, when the crew encounter an unknown life-form, and the captain asks both Kevyn and the ship's doctor for their "professional opinion." Neither one helps.

More recently, Tagon's Toughs has acquired a specialist on A.I. and robotics, who calls Kevyn "an arrogant generalist" on first meeting him. They eventually reach a balance, as Kevyn has more practical experience than the average scientist, and helps the newbie wrap her brain around concepts like "the value of field testing".

Molly in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! seems to approach all branches of knowledge holistically, and possesses an incalculably vast grasp of astrophysics, engineering, biology, literature, drama, philosophy, comic book trivia, cartoons, nursery rhymes... and yet still comes across as a bit of a ditz with very little common sense.

It has been lampshaded a couple of times that Jean Poule is strictly a biologist, and although she thinks space travel is amazingly coolnote "We're in spaaaaaayce!", physics problems stump her pretty quickly.

The strip also has Doctor Schlock, who has figured out how to clone aliens, travel through time, control nanobot swarms, and make inflatable versions of anything. In his first strip alone he attempted to test a vaccine, "air pills" that would delay someone from drownig, and slightly radioactive mascara on Bun-Bun (and that was just his "present-day" self).

Dr Nonami: Both Nonami and Mechano specialize in robotics, but also are extremely proficient in all other areas of science.

Casey and Andy dabble in any and every field to cause disasters; quantum physics, chemistry, engineering, medicine, you name it. They can build things that can do anything you wish, as long as you specify it with a descriptive name that ends with "-O-Mat". ("Can you build a Bio-Signature-Tracker-O-Mat?") They've created death rays, explosives, genengineered world-eaters, wood-fueled submarines, spacecraft, planck adjusters, wolverine claws, and started a massive fire with only jello and pineapple chunks.

Doctor H.M. Phage, T.E from Awful Hospital has described himself as the "chief physician, radiologist, surgeon, pathologist, pathogen, immunologist, urologist, gynaecologist, reverse gynaecologist, taxidermist, dentist, forensic entomologist, necrobiological reconstructionist, herbalist, fashionist and twin-core husk intersector licensed in all chromatic, material and hypothetical perception zones." Of course, he later reveals that he peer reviews his own papers, so he probably gave himself all his diplomas.

Dr. H.M. Phage, T. E : Fine, fine. We'll check on it, since you know so much better than I do all the sudden. I'm ONLY the head practitioner around here, with the single most esteemed medical certificate I've ever invented, but what do I know, right?

Van Helsing: Y-You mean in general, or withing the range of human knowledge?

Bram is a budding one. Word of God states that his four monographs are on theology, on cognitive psychology, on philosophy and on literature.

Web Original

Doctor Steel's Ph.D is never elaborated on (according to him, he is a "doctor of reality engineering"), but he's "displayed" skills in engineering, mathematics, biology, medicine, chemistry... baking (well, not so much)...

The Spoony Experiment: Doctor Insano has "the power of science", which allows him to shoot lasers out of his hands. Presumably, all the other X-Sanos are equally gifted.

In Atop the Fourth Wall's review of Spider-Man's "Planet of the Symbiotes" arc, he notes a sign advertising a "Science Expo" and comments on how in Comic Book World, "Science" seems to be a single discipline.

The Journal Entries have several of them, particularly Ken Shardik. Justified in that most of the characters are functionally immortal and so have time to acquire any skill set they desire. Ken is the oldest living being in the known universe, and had to do rather a lot of stuff on his own (there being nobody else for a long time).

Carlos from Welcome to Night Vale is always simply described as "Carlos the Scientist", with no more specific field given. To date, Carlos has mentioned work that touches on theoretical and applied physics, mechanical and electrical engineering, organic and inorganic chemistry, plant/animal/microbial biology, ecology, medicine, geology, and seismology. Fanon usually attributes this either to Carlos being spokesperson for a team of scientists from different disciplines (it's confirmed in Ep. 30 that there are still others working with him), or to simply having to develop skills outside his original field of study as the only person in Night Vale who can think in a straight line.

I'll do my best to answer your questions, but do know that I don't specialize in botany or dendrology. I am a scientist. I study science.

Averted and discussed in The Lay of Paul Twister. Paul would definitely like to give radio to the Romans, as it were, but being a modern American geek, he knows a lot of trivia about "how things work" on a lot of subjects, but very little in the way of actual details. He ends up having to find a way to get a bunch of skilled craftsmen, engineers and researchers to fill in the blanks in his attempts to get technological progress rolling.

Western Animation

Dr. Benton Quest, from Jonny Quest. Any example below without an explanation means he was shown conducting research in the area.

Archeology: "Treasure of the Temple", "The Curse of Anubis" (called in as an expert)

Paleontology: "Turu the Terrible" (identifying Turu as a pteranodon by sight)

If you want to include the various remakes in the 1990's, you can also add computer science, cryonics and the paranormal.

Professor Farnsworth from Futurama fills this role often enough. Particularly in the first movie with his quote.

Hermes: Professor, can you wire my brain directly into the main Battle Net?

Professor: I can wire anything into anything! I'm the Professor!

In The Venture Bros., we get "super-science," which is basically this turned Up to Eleven. Word of God says that the concept was created in response to this trope's ubiquity in the comic-book/animated television that the show mainly parodies. A super-scientist is a master of every scientific discipline, and capable of basically anything you might see in science fiction. Jonas Venture Sr. was the most talented super-scientist ever, and is connected in some way to almost all technology seen in the show.

His son Rusty, a main character, is a flawed version — a Bungling Inventor who is incompetent in several fields. His lone talent seems to be in genetics/biology (still in the super-scientist range).

Jonas Venture, Jr. plays this a bit straighter, having received several doctorates (in a month). And in any case, he thus far appears to have stuck to various forms of machinery.

Also parodied on South Park: Stan's father, Randy, is a geologist by trade, but is called on by the Mayor to investigate all manner of odd happenings, since aside from crazy geneticist Dr. Mephesto, Randy Marsh is the only scientist living in the entire town. He even lampshades this to the mayor, that his field of study is strictly geology.

At least, early in the show; newer episodes show Randy working in an office full of other geologists, and other scientists have appeared in other episodes.

Subverted in an episode of Kim Possible. Ron pleads with two kidnapped scientists to find some way to stop a gang of berserk robots, who explain they're both astrophysicists and know nothing of robotics.

And from another episode:

Jim and Tim: The television's broken! Can't you do something?

Mr./Dr. Possible: Well, I could put it in geosynchronous orbit, but I'm not sure how that would help.

Played straight with Doctor Drakken. A physicist by trade (specialising in robotics), he became a Mad Scientist, which is an anything-goes doctrine. He dabbles in chemistry, mindswapping, radical geology and any number of other fields. His actual plans can be awful, but his science is quite brilliant, even if he steals a lot of his inventions. The series does seem to a difference between real science, which is specialised and realistic and mad science which can do anything but is likely to blow up in your face.

His arch-rival Professor Dementor seems to be more of a straight physicist, but that may be due more to his relative lack of screen time. Ironically, unlike the polymath Drakken, he is very competent and fairly successful, to the point that Drakken often steals from him (or at least tries to).

Professor Membrane and Zim from Invader Zim. Zim is more of an inversion, as he's barely competent to highly incompetent in almost everything he does, it's just that he's (badly) using super-advanced technology. His own computer system has pointed out his lack of adroitness on a few occasions. He is a highly capable engineer, but even here he tends to shoot himself in the foot. Sometimes literally.

An episode of Captain N: The Game Master had Dr. Light, normally an expert of robotics, performing medical duties on a very human patient. Makes you wonder why they didn't use the opportunity to promote the Dr. Mario game.

Probably because it was one of the few episodes with no leanings toward comedy.

Prof. Algernon from Exo Squad is a partial subversion. On the one hand, he is skilled in theoretical physics (discovering the Gravitational Focus Effect which "cannot be explained by normal physics"), numerous forms of engineering (building the GRAF Shield, upgrading Able Squad's E-Frames), and neuroscience (curing Dark Matter Syndrome). Also VR painting. However, when consulted on the subject of genetics, he is quick to point out that it isn't his field and can provide no assistance.

Transformers Animated. Professor Sumdac spends most of the second season as Megatron's prisoner, forced to help him construct a space-bridge from stolen Autobot schematics. He specifically mentions that this isn't his area of expertise, though he gets the hang of it eventually (having Megatron as his 'boss' probably encouraged him).

"I don't know anything about space bridges, I don't claim to know anything about them, this is not even my area of expertise: I do servo mechanics, not teleportation."

Judging by his inventions, Professor Utonium of The Powerpuff Girls is, at the minimum, an electrical engineer, a chemist, a biologist, and a theoretical physicist.

He has a Nobel Prize in "Science."

The title characters of Phineas and Ferb have constructed everything from robots to spaceships to time machines, despite only being fourteen at most. The same goes for Mad Scientist Dr. Doofenshmirtz, who can create anything you can slap the "-inator" suffix on.

The Real Ghostbusters: Egon Spengler is supposed to be a psychologist and parapsychologist. He is almost always a physicist (and paraphysicist) and mathematician as well. On top of that, depending on what the plot wants him to know, he's also a qualified engineer, microbiologist, evolutionary biologist, biochemist, chemist, entomologist, etc. And he still has time to be a mycologist in his spare time.

Godzilla: The Series: Drs. Nick Tatopolous was a radiobiologist (radiations' effects on living things) and Elsie Chapman is a paleontologist. Dr. Mendel Craven is established as a roboticist, but he's quite capable in computer programming, biochemistry, and engineering. All three share knowledge in various branches of chemistry, biology, and especially zoology. Elsie sort of lampshades it by mentioning Mendel having two PhDs in the first episode.

Dilbert: Dilbert has, on the show, designed exercise machines (one incorporating an experimental graviton generator), rockets, satellites, AIs, a rocket equipped with AI, and massive networked computer systems. His company has also produced everything from throat lozenges to rocket ships.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) has this trope all over the place. Donatello is only 15, and yet clearly is quite knowledgeable in engineering, robotics, and computer programming - even when its in an alien language. This might however be handwaved as a consequence of his mutant nature, as various human scientists tend to be more limited. Baxter Stockman is clearly more a robotics man than anythng else, and Doctor Falco doesn't dabble in too much beyond biology (even if taken to odd extremes). Its also invoked by Leo regarding why the Kraang took April's father, claiming that its because "He's a scientist", only to be defied by April when she points out that her father's field of study (psychology) is completely irrelevant to what the Kraang are doing.

Several of Mighty Max's various Mad Scientist enemies can qualify. For example, Professor Zygote is supposedly an evolutionary biologist, but he also knows an awful lot about gene splicing, plus enough about engineering to have built himself a Devolution Device. Dr. Bob Scorpio also qualifies; his primary field of study seems to be some odd combination of entomology and nuclear physics, granting him both the ability to create mutant scorpions and the knowledge to make a nuclear bomb big enough to destroy all of Nevada.

Elise from Dan Vs. is a government agent who's been involved in several top secret experiments. She's shown to be good at different fields of science such as chemistry* (had to keep a container of harmful chemicals she was working on in the kitchen once), hacking* (hacks into a banks' security system), and robotics * (shown repairing a robot co-worker).

Real Life

Can, rarely, be an example of Truth in Television—if you go far enough back in history. This is the origin of the phrase Renaissance Man; during the Renaissance, most fields of science were sufficiently new and undeveloped that someone with above-average intelligence could be an expert in more than one or two. By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's time, science had sufficiently diversified that this was no longer possible except in emerging fields; Goethe (an extreme case of genius) is thus sometimes called "the last man to know everything". Much the same is said of Henri Poincaré (died 1912) in mathematics.

The Renaissance Mandid also have to know what at the time was treated like science and was later found not to actually work - all manner of mysticism, in short, including alchemy, astrology, etc. He would generally treat magic as another science - it made as much sense as anything else at the time.

Aristotle knew everything there was to know in his time. He proved the Earth was round, catalogued every known animal (along the way, he was the first to differentiate whales from fish), advanced all natural sciences, organized legal knowledge, and made art commentaries that are still quoted in colleges (particularly his problems with "Deus Machina" endings), and the list goes on... He wrote the book on every discipline of his time and made new advancements in almost every one of them.

Athanasius Kircher is another historical example, with Bunny-Ears Lawyer tendencies as well. Not only did he study geology, ancient Egyptian heiroglyphs ("decoding" occult meanings that probably weren't there), and microbiology (in his time a new science), he designed a "cat piano" played by making the cats squeal in pain.

While geared towards engineering rather than research, fields of bioengineering deal with applications of technology with respect to biological systems. This means that bioengineers have to be trained in various sciences pertaining to engineering (usually mechanical or electrical engineering, so various fields of physics) and biochemistry. This isn't nearly every discipline, but it is still a much broader range than most scientists and engineers tend to deal with.

The first two years of an undergrad degree in bioengineering can feel like they are spent trying to become one of these. Often it isn't until the third year that students actually start bringing all those different disiplines together. Some people say doing actual engineering is what graduate school is for.

Biomedical engineering is especially diverse, requiring knowledge of mechanical, electrical, and bioengineering, chemistry, biology, physics, computer programming, some post-calculus mathematics, statistics, and materials science. They even take some limited coursework in liability law. It is probably the closest thing to an omnidisciplinary scientist there is, and it is so by necessity.

Averted in the case of the Wright brothers. You'd think that people who successfully developed powered flight would be something special and know about everything from engineering to physics to what have you. Wrong. No one on the Wright team had more than a high school education and the brothers themselves operated a bicycle shop.

But the high school the Wrights attended was equivalent to a modern four-year college and Wilbur had intended to go to Princeton.

And making bicycles is engineering. They also closely observes birds, developed wind tunnels, and made prototypes, so "not having knowledge of physics or the sciences" is a gross over simplification as they developed flight following the scientific method.

Noam Chomsky is knowledgeable in linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience and politics, but he's also a highly respected intellectual in each field.

Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel is largely based on the fact that being a physiologist, geographer and a biologist (among other things) gave him a new viewpoint to anthropology and history. It's also why it's such a brilliant book that can be recommended to anybody who has any interest in... anything.

The specialization of scientists nowadays is in fact somewhat of a problem which many universities now try to fix by recommending interdisciplinary studies.

Al-Jazari (copied from the other wiki) was a "Muslim polymath: a scholar, inventor, mechanical engineer, craftsman, artist, mathematician and astronomer". Though he is most famous for his engineering feats. He invented robots. He was also one of the first pioneers of, you guessed it, algebra.

Michael Faraday is essentially a founding figure in chemistry, physics, and any discipline involving electricity. He discovered benzene (paving the way for practically all organic chemistry since), invented an early type of Bunsen burner, formulated and demonstrated the principle of electric induction (effectively inventing the electric generator), and invented the electric motor. His work also laid the ground for field theory in physics.

Debating a topic for long enough requires arguing from any POV or angles (scientific, metaphysical, cultural, economic, political..); this naturally leads to multidisciplinary understanding and comprehension, but not mastery.

Benjamin Franklin: he was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, scientist, musician, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. He invented Everything from Bifocals and a heater, to lighting rods. On top of that, he wrote the book on electricity.

Jean-Paul Marat was a political theorist, a politician and a journalist, but also a physician, who dabbled in optical sciences (predicting the lazar in one of his works) and curing illnesses like gonorrhea.

Isaac Asimov was the guy other Science Fiction authors would go to for information on stuff. When asked what it felt like to know everything, he responded that it felt "like being a museum."

Several well-known crackpots throughout history considered themselves to be masters of several fields of science at once — and, sometimes, their followers agreed with them. Wilhelm Reich, who created the notion of Orgone Energy, was trained in medicine and psychiatry; but his propoents also claim he was an expert chemist, biologist, nuclear physicist, and astronomer, because his theories brushed up against those subjects.

Astronauts. Typically they have at least one doctorate in one of the hard sciences — multiple doctorates are common — plus they are cross-trained in other disciplines, and they learn how to operate spaceships, work in zero gravity, and fix stuff that goes wrong.

Many scientists are proficient computer programmers. They have a need for custom software and rarely have the funds to hire a pro. In many disciplines they also become very adept electronics technicians or mechanics as a result of building experimental equipment from scratch. Field biologists who collect live specimens can be alarmingly good shots with a rifle. Many chemists are (or at least, have been in the past) quite proficient glass blowers, due to the need to make custom equipment. Furthermore, while a given scientist may not have formal education in another field, most scientists are trained to think the same way, and typically as a consequence understand more about other fields than the average non-scientist. Physicists understanding quantum chemistry, chemists understanding molecular biology, etc.

Any scientist who does field work is often this. Geologist working in the Arctic? Skilled at cold weather survival, fixing engines, probably better at getting electronics to work in the cold than the engineer who designed them, and a decent shot with a rifle on top of it (polar bears). Marine biologist in the tropics? Skilled boat handler, mechanic, SCUBA diver, and likely has strong opinions about, and an impressive collection of, knives. Working in an isolated area to do something that maybe a dozen people in the world actually understand tends to do this.

Charles Pellegrino, co-author of The Killing Star and science consultant to James Cameron, describes himself as a "polymath". He's an expert in both the wreck of the Titanic, and the theoretical design of antimatter starships. (However, it appears his claims of having a Ph.D. from Victoria University may have been a fabrication.)

L. Ron Hubbard was an author whose scientific knowledge consisted of one nuclear physics class at which he failed. However, according to the Church of Scientology, he was a nuclear physicist, botanist, anthropologist, evolutionary biologist, archaeologist, psychologist, pilot, musician, photographer, cinematographer, philosopher and expert in at least one field that he himself invented.

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